project morpheus

PSN Now is coming to open beta on July 31, and more platforms are coming soon. Project Morpheus has three demos on the floor, but no big update on the ETA. However, the best news is the introduction of the PlayStation TV — the North American and European version of the Vita TV. So much more than just video games at Sony’s conference.

It’s now possible to dynamically represent your entire body inside of a virtual world, and this monumental task can be accomplished with off-the-shelf hardware. With three first-gen Kinects and an Oculus Rift dev kit, a developer by the name of Oliver Kreylos has hacked together a true VR prototype that actually makes you feel like you’re in a computer-generated world.

Now that Oculus has Mark Zuckerberg as a sugar-daddy, it seems that ZeniMax wants in on some of that sweet Facebook cash. John Carmack’s former employer is claiming that Oculus VR is unfairly using its intelectual property, and it’s threatening to take action. John Carmack and the Oculus team quickly and publicly rebutted ZeniMax’s claims, but the legal situation is bound to get even stickier from here.

Virtual reality is currently the hot new thing in the world of gaming. If these technology giants actually execute on the promise of “VR that doesn’t suck,” virtual reality has the potential to invigorate the industry like nothing else before. However, the Rift and Morpheus have decades of VR failure to fight against. Even if the finished products are solid, can they convince the average consumer that virtual reality is worth the investment?

One of the largest issues with existing virtual reality solutions is the latency between the input and the display. If the disparity between your head movements and the display is large enough, the latency problem can actually induce nausea in some people. To solve this issue, the team at Oculus VR recently introduced a feature called “time warping,” and it’s going to make a noticeable difference in terms of latency and frame rate in VR games.

In the days since the Project Morpheus announcement, the internet has been abuzz with excitement. Sony’s new VR helmet for the PS4 is receiving substantial mainstream coverage and a surprising amount of praise from the gaming and technology community. Sony is knocking it out of the park with Project Morpheus, and we’re all going to benefit from it.

Obviously terrified of being squeezed out of the market by Sony’s Project Morpheus virtual reality headset, Oculus VR has announced the imminent arrival of its second-generation Oculus Rift dev kit: The DK2. The DK2 has high-res, low-latency 1080p displays per eye, among other improved features. The DK2 is available to pre-order for $350, and should ship by July. The consumer version, along with decent support for AAA games, is still looking like a 2015 release at the earliest.

Last year, Sony released the most powerful game console ever created at a price point lower than the competition. At the beginning of this year, the company announced that it would release a Netflix-style game streaming service sometime this summer. Last night, Sony announced its own virtual reality gaming headset, called Project Morpheus. Now, more than anyone, Sony is leading the way to the future of video games.

Virtual reality just went mainstream. After the Oculus Rift prototype blew the doors off in 2012, it was only a matter of time until larger companies moved in on the concept of modern VR gaming. Sony just unveiled its plans to release a VR headset for the PS4, and this just might be the Oculus Rift’s first real competition.

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